Gentle reader,
Today, I get to share the second half of a chapter on Christian spirituality from my short book God the Spirit. You can find the first half here. I hope you enjoy this excerpt.
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From chapter 3, “Being Spirit, being spiritual” in God the Spirit: Introducing Pneumatology in Wesleyan and Ecumenical Perspective by Beth Felker Jones. Used by permission of Wipf and Stock Publishers, www.wipfandstock.com. All rights reserved.
Spiritual and Religious
Given that Gnosticism is a lie, it is problematic to claim to be “spiritual but not religious.” Generally, this expression signals something like the Gnostic dualism that would divide spirituality from the stuff of the material world. The claim to be “spiritual but not religious” tends to rest on the assumption that spirituality concerns the inner person—the heart, the mind, the soul, the emotions, or the intentions—and so does not concern bodily things. Because this version of spirituality is believed to be something interior, it is also considered private and not something to be inflicted on the outside world, in which toleration is the ultimate virtue. The same sentiment, that of being “spiritual but not religious,” tends to equate religion with dead forms, meaningless rituals, and dogmatic beliefs. This brand of popular spirituality will not do for Christians, whose spirituality must be about life in the Holy Spirit. Because the Holy Spirit, the transcendent God, is intimately involved in creation, because the Holy Spirit works with and in the material world, stuff matters.
This is not to say that the critique of “religion” implied in the idea of being “spiritual but not religious” has no merit at all. A religion of dead forms and meaningless rituals is a problem for the Christian spiritual life, that life lived in the Holy Spirit, just as a spirituality of interior feelings is a problem. The Christian spiritual life, following the example of Jesus, is a life in which every aspect of our being becomes one integrated whole. In that integrity—unity and wholeness of body and soul—we are transformed in holiness and enabled to witness to the love of God. If Gnostic spirituality brackets everything material out of the spiritual life, pushing bodies and action and practices to the side, perhaps the dead religiosity that those who would be “spiritual but not religious” tend to disdain brackets the interior out of the religious life, pushing emotions and commitments and contemplation to the side. Neither kind of bracketing is Christian.
In the spiritual life, guided by the Holy Spirit, all is united in an integrated whole: interior and exterior, individual and corporate, soul and body, contemplation and action, commitment and practice, emotion and the day-to-day life of the church. The Christian life must always be spiritual and religious in this sense. False spiritualities are revealed as false in the truth of the Holy Spirit, and nominal religiosities are revealed by that same Spirit as the dead things they are. But in no way is it the case that ritual, form, doctrine, corporate worship, sacrament, liturgy, and all the other specific manifestations of religious life in the Christian church must be likewise dead. Not at all. The Holy Spirit, the Spirit of life, gives life to these things and to us, offering us a spiritual integrity like that of Christ.
Birds of Paradise, Patricia Tobacco Forrester, American, born 1940, CC0 Public Domain Designation, via The Art Institute of Chicago.
The Spirit and Bodies
Theologian Eugene Rogers sees, in Scripture, that the Spirit “rests on” bodies. Rogers highlights ways in which the Spirit, “in classical Christian discourse ‘pours out on all flesh,’” and he bemoans that “in modern Christian discourse, [the Spirit has] floated free of bodies altogether.”1 Rogers asks a provocative question: “What if the Spirit had grown boring because it no longer had anything to do with the body?”2 He suggests that neglect of the Spirit may be rooted in this fundamental error, and he insists that the Spirit is “immanent in bodily things.”3 Rogers’s thesis agrees with my assessment above. Indeed, the Spirit loves bodies and rests upon them.
One of the most marvelous truths of pneumatology is that the Spirit, who is truly God, who is transcendent and glorious and holy and not-like-us, also chooses to dwell within us. The Spirit rests on bodies (and this is no small thing), but the Spirit also lives in bodies. The crucial biblical passage here is 1 Corinthians 6:
“The body is meant not for fornication but for the Lord, and the Lord for the body. And God raised the Lord and will also raise us by his power. Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ? Should I therefore take the members of Christ and make them members of a prostitute? Never! Do you not know that whoever is united to a prostitute becomes one body with her? For it is said, “The two shall be one flesh.” But anyone united to the Lord becomes one spirit with him. Shun fornication! Every sin that a person commits is outside the body; but the fornicator sins against the body itself. Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, which you have from God, and that you are not your own?” (1 Cor 6:13–19)
Bodily matters—in this case, sex with prostitutes—are spiritually important. One cannot split off body from soul, as though what one does with one’s body is insignificant. Spiritual practices in the Wesleyan tradition, embodied practices, acknowledge this reality in that they involve the body. The Wesleyan small group meeting, concern for the poor and hungry, meeting for love feasts or potlucks: all these are practices in which we are gathered by the Spirit, to whom our bodies matter.
The body is purposeful, goal oriented. The body is for the Lord. What is more, the Holy Spirit indwells us so that our bodies become temples. Here, we learn of the miracle that the Spirit—holy and transcendent, utterly different from us—chooses us. The Spirit is with us and loves us and does not disdain us. Poet John Donne relishes just this glorious contradiction:
Wilt thou love God, as He thee? then digest,
My soul, this wholesome meditation,
How God the Spirit, by angels waited on
In heaven, doth make His Temple in thy breast.4
Digest it, indeed: this sweet, strange gift. God the holy, other, transcendent, majestic, magnificent and eternal, takes up residence within us. Here is the gift and power of the Spiritual life, and—Donne is quite right—here is a testimony of God’s love for us that ought to provoke us to ardent love for God in return.
Questions for Consideration5
What are some of the challenges of using the words Spirit and spiritual in our contemporary culture?
What is Gnostic spirituality? Why is it considered a distortion of the Christian faith?
What are the key scriptural truths that speak against Gnosticism?
What does life in the Holy Spirit truly entail with respect to the spiritual life, or the life of Christian discipleship?
Why is it important to emphasize how the Spirit not only rests on our bodies, but also lives in our bodies? What are the moral implications of this claim for Christian practice and conduct, and for ministry?
Grace & peace,
BFJ
As always, if this post has been good to you, I’m grateful if you choose to forward or share.
This post contains associate links. You can order a copy of God the Spirit here.
When I see the expression "spiritual but not religious," Dolly Parton comes to mind as a well-known personality who has made that claim. She is very generous with her fortune but for many it may be a way out of supporting a congregation of the Church of Jesus Christ with time, talent, and treasure. I recall too as a child Roy Rogers' sign off each week, "God has given you a week; can't you give him back an hour?"